And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

. . . Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.

Stubb doesn’t do a whole lot of thinking in Chapter 61. The bulk of “Stubb kills a Whale,” consists of a tense, slow-motion chase to the death, much like what one might watch between a fox and a rabbit on the Discovery channel. As animals ourselves, we human observers of such chases often find ourselves caught between excited interest in the predator, and crushing sympathy for the prey.

“Stubb kills a Whale” certainly does not glorify Stubb and his crew, who come off as heartless, bloodthirsty savages. Ishmael reinforces this intentional portrait with literal war-whoops from Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg; as well as with an image of the redness of whale blood reflecting onto each man’s face after the kill. Ishmael here clearly paints all men as savages in the hunt.

Ishmael also clearly does what he can to peak our sympathy for the pursued whale. Ishmael shows us that beyond merely wanting to survive, the whale is afraid, and panicked, and later “tormented.” We see as readers what the hunters cannot see in the thick of the chase — the whale is in pain.

Some might argue that the emotions which Ishmael conjures in his readers throughout “Stubb kills a Whale” constitute a criticism of the hunt, but I think such ideas are anachronistic, and furthermore miss a more important point. Animals have been killing animals since the beginning of time, in an unfortunate (perhaps) but necessary life process. What we need to remember — what we hope Stubb remembers as he stands thoughtfully over his dead whale — is a respect for the humanity of animals, and a recognition of the animalism of human beings.